Nicholas Timmins has filed a special report for the FT [subscriptions] on how good - and how sustainable - the NHS is. Timmins, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and the King’s Fund, says as the health service approaches its 65th birthday, bits have "fallen off the edges". He adds:

The essential edifice from 1948, however, still stands

He looks at patient satisfaction, NHS performance and funding issues and says the biggest test of sustainability lies ahead as the health service contends with the effects of the global financial crisis, the UK’s economic performance and public spending constraints. Other countries similarly affected are raising charges, cutting healthcare provision, or slashing workers' pay, says Timmins. But, he adds, optimists believe that austerity may force through reforms - such as reconfiguration, more community services and integration - that many believe are necessary.

Following a review of legal advice, CQC has written to the secretary of state for health with the names of the people who had been anonymised in the independent report by Grant Thornton into CQC’s registration and oversight of University Hospitals Morecambe Bay.

CQC is also today publishing on its website the internal report referred to in the Grant Thornton report.

James Meikle writes that an analysis by the Office for National Statistics has found 37% of bereaved relatives in the least deprived areas rated GP care as excellent, compared with 30% in the most deprived areas. The story adds:

The difference in the quality of end-of-life care received is not statistically significant in any other service – out of hours, district or community nurses, care homes or hospital doctors and nurses, according to a bulletin based on responses from about 22,300 people to a national survey on families bereaved in 2011.

A trial at Barts and the The Royal London hospitals not only saved on bills, but ensured patients slept better, speeding their recovery and return home. Operation TLC — Turn off, Lights out, Close doors — has saved £100,000 since December, a figure expected to rise to £400,000 when rolled out across the six Barts Health Trust hospitals, which also include Whipps Cross, Newham, Mile End and the London Chest Hospital.

Catherine Foot has written a blogpost for the King's Fund about data. She writes that 92 doctors have been in the news over their decision to opt out of the government's plan to publish outcomes data for named consultants. Now, the department of health is considering whether to name and shame these doctors when it starts to publish the rest of the data next month.

Data publication might give ... managers and commissioners the ammunition they need to tackle the poor or outlier performers that they have, up to now, failed to hold to account. And, if we’re speculating, it might even work through patients using the information to make choices about who to be treated by.

But is this the only way to improve quality? Of course not, and neither is it likely to be the best. But we need multiple approaches to tackling poor quality and to improving performance, and on balance this seems like a plausible one to try.

Speaking during a Lords debate, the health minister, Earl Howe, said the Care Quality Commission will on Thursday name the senior managers accused of covering up its failures to spot weaknesses in the Cumbrian healthcare system.

Health minister Lord Howe. Experts warn that releasing the names of medical staff at the centre of the scandal could prejudice a police inquiry.

The task is daunting, but I remain an optimist. I believe we increasingly understand what needs to be done, and that the willpower needed to do it is gradually building. If a single number tells us where we should look first, it is the National Audit Office’s finding that 30 per cent of all non-emergency admissions are avoidable.

If we do not make sure our care services work together to address this, this figure will grow steadily as our ageing population sees chronic illness and multiple morbidities account for a rapidly increasing proportion of caseloads. Accepting this status quo is not an option. We must view this change in what hospitals do as an opportunity, not a problem.

He continues:

We need to build more exit points on the path that leads patients to hospital, and we need to reconfigure hospitals themselves to optimise efficiency and quality.

Ally Paget has written a blogpost for Demos highlighting the importance of end of life care services. She talks about the findings of a Demos paper that reveal "an unacceptable level of variation in the kind, timeliness and quality of support that patients receive in the months, weeks and days before death." She concludes:

More than any of our other interactions with health and care, end of life care services are the ones we should most expect to need. Their sheer universality should give them an advantage in terms of how they are planned and delivered. Currently, the reverse is true. Shrouded in complexity, and hampered by an unwillingness on all sides to discuss death, the end of life service journey is not easy to navigate.

He says a Localis round table event for council leaders, MPs and health professionals asked whether the government's recasting of the relationship between the NHS and local government will herald a new era of opportunity for integrated health and care services. And he adds:

... the good news is that the leaders present conveyed a near feverish excitement about their enhanced powers, hailing the homecoming of public health to local government after years in the wilderness. For one councillor, health and wellbeing boards are a crucible for integration in local authorities, uniquely positioned to unite local councils, children's services, adult social care, public health, patients and the public, delivering co-ordinated, personalised care. For another, the age of working in silos is over.

Public health professionals, too, expressed a sense of relief at being released from the shackles of NHS control and the opportunity – long awaited – to commission freely in response to local needs.

She writes that the game encourages young people to interact with each other in the offline world.

Zones has been designed with interaction experts and theatre-makers, Coney, to ensure that genuine gamification is incorporated into the design. Central to its design is that it gets people to connect, with eye contact, in a safe place where the digital world is temporary put on hold. It relies on trust and teamwork. Feedback during development suggests that it is a welcome modern take on a tried and tested means to get people talking.

Zones is a board game that is designed to encourage young people to discuss sex, alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Photograph: 23red

What the papers say about the CQC report

Public confidence in the NHS and in its regulation will be deeply shaken by yesterday's report into UHMB, and by the admission from the CQC's new chairman David Prior that his organisation was not fit for purpose when he began in April, and still has to work to do. But many of the weaknesses the independent investigation uncovered are already familiar from the Francis report into Mid-Staffs less than six months ago. There is no doubting the CQC has a short and unhappy history, but that may be partly down to the structure of the NHS it is struggling to regulate.

Julie Bailey, who exposed the Mid-Staffs scandal, wrote a piece for the Daily Mail saying that the new baby deaths cover-up proves secrecy infects the entire NHS bureaucracy. She writes:

What was so absurd was that, in the wake of Mid-Staffs, the Care Quality Commission promised it had changed its ways. At the Francis Inquiry into Mid-Staffs, the Commission’s bosses made sweeping claims about how there were more rigorous systems and a new forensic management in place.

But, as Morecambe proves, it was all nonsense. The same culture of collusion and inadequacy was still all too prevalent.

The system would be much better and safer if the rights of patients were enshrined. Patient satisfaction should be built into how hospitals are judged and how chief executives are paid. Patients should have easy access to their own health records and it should be a simple matter to find out where a hospital ranks, both locally and elsewhere in the country.

Ann Treneman wrote a sketch for the Times (subscription) about Jeremy Hunt's speech in the Commons yesterday.

You did not have to have X-ray vision to see that there was something here, in the Chamber, that was not right. For, at the centre of this debate about secrecy in the NHS and cover-up at the CQC was, well, secrecy and cover-up. And it is this that made the whole thing seem so frustrating.

The wider crisis in the NHS is unresolved; and it is extraordinary that the government has felt it necessary to bring in American medicare professor Don Berwick, a former adviser to President Obama, to instil a culture of safety in hospitals. We can, it seems, no longer trust our own clinicians to restore the trust that patients and their families need to feel in our health system.

If there's a story, report or event you'd like to highlight – or you would like to share your thoughts on any of the healthcare issues in the news today – you can get in touch by leaving a comment below the line or tweeting us at @GdnHealthcare.

Good morning and welcome to the daily live blog from the Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network. Throughout the day, we'll be bringing you news, comment and analysis from around the web.

The story of the Care Quality Commission's alleged cover-up over its failure to investigate an alarming rise in deaths in Morecambe Bay NHS trust hospitals dominates today's papers, making the front page of many.

The Guardian reports that Liberal Democrat chair Tim Farron has written to the Metropolitan police following publication of a fiercely critical report that suggested officials might have deliberately suppressed an internal review highlighting weaknesses in its inspections of the trust.